"Theme development is a tedious and difficult task, and for the GTK devs to be so careless in breaking their API at every turn disrespects the many hours people put into making themes for it. [...] I was given to believe that this breakage stems from a Microsoft-like climate of preventing users from customizing their systems, and deliberately breaking the work of others so that your 'brand' is the best. Anytime I hear the word 'brand' being used in Linux, I know something valuable is being poisoned." I find the tone of this one a bit too harsh and overly negative at times, but his point still stands.

<troll>
No, because they inherited Apple NIH sindrom and wont use something because it is someone else idea (until they copy it, then it's theirs). So they did their own language and are working on their own toolchain too. As for copying OSX, once they removed everything, they will have a very nice base to start with.
</troll>

I'm afraid I would call that reality. After ten plus years of watching what looks like a duck I am forced to conclude that it is, indeed, a duck.

So I went on IRC. They were really polite and helped me solve my problem quickly.

They are polite as long as you believe that their way is the best way.

I understand they had a major release (3.0) and wanted to clean things up. The problem is, the API un-freeze has not ended ever since, even if it is officially in place.

So they don't understand point releases and they don't understand maintaining compatibility between those versions? GTK 2 certainly got that whether you think it is a good toolkit or not. GTK 3 is lunacy.

But when it impact other peoples work and ideals, is that really acceptable behavior? I don't think so. There is no solution. The GNOME can't be forced to care about something they don't.

Well, if Gnome wants to support only one theme then fine. Great. It shouldn't stop people should they want to. However, the real problem is that they are enforcing this view through pointless breakages in GTK - a graphical toolkit that should be stable that people who don't use Gnome use.

The fact that they're filing bugs with GTK applications to tell people that they don't support something any more shows an astonishing level of intolerance.